To read Dr. James
Dobson’s Dare to Discipline (1970) is to be
transported, as if by the tang of a Proustian biscuit, back
to the ‘60s, back to the lived reality—the very qualia
of that era are resurrected in this book. But the
perspective is unfamiliar. Instead of a Bobo stroll down
the lane of memory that leads from Kent State to Joan Baez
singing Barbara Allen, we find ourselves among
Americans of conventional persuasion threatened by disorder
on every hand. They are horrified and angry—and Dobson
writes on their behalf, addressing them and representing
them, with just the right message, and in prose pitched
perfectly to the needs. The book provides a vivid picture
of a certain frame of mind while it’s under construction.

Dare to Discipline launched Dobson’s
career as a political force. You probably
know him as one of several powerful
religious conservatives who keep watch on
the Bush administration on behalf of the
so-called base. You might also know him as
the man who outed Tinky-winky, the gay
Teletubby—which is actually more revealing
of the particular nature of his enormous
influence. No organization on the hard right
has more influence than Dobson’s Focus on
the Family. He originally set up shop
as the anti-Benjamin Spock, as a
pediatrician speaking out for traditional
mores. He now dominates the whole field
of ideas that cluster under the rubric
“family values” because he embodies the
authority of medical science as well as
religious fundamentalism. What The
Closing of the American Mind was to
secular neo-cons, Dare to Discipline
was to Christian fundamentalists. It is an
ur-document of movement conservatism in
America that shows us what domestic brands
of fundamentalism have in common with their
kindred in other lands.

Academic experts on fundamentalism, focused
on the Islamic variety, routinely agree on
the importance of humiliation as a
motivator. The gist is this: the experience
of violation through occupation—literally,
in the case of military intrusion,
figuratively, in the case of cultural and
technological domination—cuts deep and burns
steady. For some, nothing short of terror
can purge the shame.

But the experience of violation also
motivates domestic forms of fundamentalism
that limit themselves to fantasies of
redemptive vengeance, to elaborate visions
of Rapture and End Times. It’s the terror
drama—but it’s played out symbolically.
If you happened to see Jerry Falwell or Pat
Robertson gloating over the carnage that
9/11 inflicted on Sin City, you will know
that this is no exaggeration. In the
emotion of that moment, the civil façade
they usually manage to maintain slipped a
bit, and we caught a glimpse of the abiding
longing for apocalypse that shapes their
mission in the world. For fundamentalists of
all kinds, the threat of violation is
diagnostic. That’s why they need an
invincible system of doctrine and practice
that can bind the totality of life into a
single, invulnerable arrangement.

Take, for example, the commonplace
observation that puritans are obsessed with
sexual display in popular culture. The
conventional implication is that they
wouldn’t be obsessed if they weren’t
aroused. And that’s true but it misses the
essential point. Over and above that,
there’s the fact that lust, once stimulated,
invades the body whether you like it or
not. For a puritanical man, sexual
display—from the ubiquitous ads to the way
Western females inclined to bodily candor
dress—is experienced as a violation that
deprives him of bodily autonomy. Hence the
emphasis on family values in all
forms of fundamentalism, not just among
Americans. The omnipresent forces of
sexuality has to be contained in an order of
comparable strength. So men must gather here
and women there on this occasion, and then
in some other fixed place on that occasion,
dressing and behaving in just this way and
not that. It’s all about boundaries and
categories that make it possible to live
in one way, and so secure the true
believer from pollution in a fallen world.
And nowhere is that security provided by
those boundaries and categories more
urgently needed than in the domestic realm,
the very nursery of society.

That security is what Dare to Discipline
promised its besieged readership back in
the 1960’s.

The book opens with a cleansing gesture.
Right away you know you’re in good hands,
the firm hands of a leader willing to draw
lines. He dismisses—casts out—the hippies
and radicals on the other side of the
“generation gap.” No point in compromise,
he tells the reader, right up front; no
point in dialogue—those kids are a lost
cause. Leave them to their miserable fates.

That alone was enough to stiffen parental
spines in threatened households across the
land. But the doctor also offered a
diagnosis to explain the loss, and a
prescription for a brighter future that put
the spotlight on those same parents. It was
not to late to save the next generation
because the anarchy (one of Dobson’s
favorite words) of the 60s was easily
explained. Nothing to do with Jim Crow or
Vietnam or one dimensional mass society. It
was the fault of permissive parenting. And,
by extension, of permissive educating and,
by further extension, of a permissive
“anything goes” culture—but it all begins at
home.

Hence the doctor’s prescription: dare to
discipline. The cure for the 60s was as
simple as the diagnosis. All that was
wanting was the will.

Right from the beginning of the book, you
notice how much jargon and slang Dobson
uses, to peculiar and revealing effect. He
so often misapplies these expressions in
ways that show how far removed from what he
refers to as the “youth scene” he actually
was—as when he calls the “Playboy
Philosophy” the banner of this younger
generation, as if the Diggers of
Haight-Ashbury were hanging out with Hugh
Hefner in Vegas when they weren’t holding
Be-Ins in Golden Gate Park. But, however
applied, he almost always puts jargon and
slang in scare quotes, an expression that
might have been coined to explain this
little tic in his style. As you settle into
the flow of Dobson’s language, you realize
that he experiences slang and jargon as, in
their own little way, yet another threat to
order. He needs sometimes to use these
expressions, to show an understanding of
what’s going on out there, but they have to
be set apart somehow, so as not to
contaminate the unaffected language of
ordinary folk and the official terminologies
of medical men. As when, for example, he
describes the lavish Thanksgiving
celebration that takes place each year at
his home in a “family blessed with several
of the greatest cooks who ever ruled a
kitchen, and once a year they do their
‘thing’...”

Women, in their proper place, are both
sovereign and happy, you see. Their “thing”
is most truly theirs when they are
fulfilling traditional roles.

Scare quotes like this are surface symptoms
of a commitment to order that informs
Dare to Discipline at every level. That
explains why Dobson can’t tell the
difference between Sinatra’s Rat Pack and
Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, between street
crime and campus demonstrations, inner city
gangs and rural communards, pot and heroin,
Woodstock and Altamont. To him it’s all the
same—one big chaos violating the duly
constituted order.

Dobson’s language in general leaves no doubt
that he feels personally violated. It is
most evident when he confronts The Filthy
Hippie, that walking symbol of all that
reactionaries loathed and dreaded in those
years. So, for example, Dobson describes
the sad fate of permissive parents Mr. and
Mrs. Holloway, who had not dared to
discipline their daughter Becky during the
critical early years (“Truly, the toddler is
a tiger”) and thus the “ticking time-bomb”
that is the teenager was set to explode.
Becky’s now got Mom and Dad so buffaloed
they’ll agree to anything. She gets them to
throw a party for her and they work “very
hard to get the house decorated and the
refreshments prepared” but “on the appointed
evening” their hospitality is flouted as “a
mob of dirty, profane teenagers swarmed into
the house, breaking and destroying the
furnishings as they came...”

Decorations and refreshments and appointed
evenings—it’s all so fragile, so vulnerable.

That was the gist of the 60s as Dr. Dobson
understood the era that shaped him as surely
has it shaped his enemies. Violation of an
established order, once underway, will not
contain itself. It won’t stop with dirt and
a few ruined “furnishings.” There’s a very
slippery slope. The Holloway fable ends
with Becky beating Mrs. Holloway unconscious
in the family bathroom where Mr. Holloway
finds her “lying in a pool of blood” when he
returns. Meantime, our undisciplined Becks
is out “in the backyard, dancing with her
friends.”

Hmmm...let me see. I was around at the
time. I don’t think I remember
that happening very often.

But in Dobson’s world there are no
gradations. Gradations are a threat to
boundaries. It’s all or nothing, always.

He does provide his readers with some
retribution fantasies, though, as if to
right the balance there and then, in
anticipation of the generational turning of
the tide his system of parenting will
bring. So, for example, Dobson discourses
on the kind of teenager who might benefit
from discipline of the military variety and
it turns out to be—guess who?—the “sullen,
filthy, hostile young men” who “come
sauntering into the Marine Corps processing
station [?] with the same snarl and glare
they used for frightening folks back home.”
Dobson’s hippies seem to be morphing into
50s delinquents at this point, but,
whatever, they morph back soon enough.
After getting off a few remarks like “Hey,
man—don’t bug me, man!” they are conducted
to the climactic encounter “a few hours
later” when “these hairy adolescents” are
“shorn absolutely bald—until nothing but
ears remain amid all that skin.”

Ah, justice.

Dr. Dobson has a thing about hair. But so
did a lot of people back in the day. You
had to be there. It is next to impossible
to overstate the significance of unruly hair
in defining that epoch. Disorder incarnate.
Disgust with filthy hippies was as intense
and widespread as it was purposefully
provoked. Shaggy hair on boys, hairy legs
on girls—hair was the symbolic war toy that
perfectly suited both sides, a concrete
representation of the kind of violation that
was ultimately at stake, the kind Dobson and
his people dreaded most, the attitude that
was, as they rightly discerned, really
driving the counter-culture.

Defiance.

That’s why, when the doctor lays out his
program for parenting, the entire system
hinges on one issue—authority and its
enforcement. Like so many authoritarians,
going back to Hobbes himself, Dobson is a
behaviorist. He can barely contain his
delight as he dotes over the powers that
this “magnificent theory for the control of
behavior” has placed in the hands of those
in charge. He rhapsodizes on for pages
about experiments with animals, descriptions
tinged with a certain sadism—a fish that
starves to death because it has been
conditioned not to lunge for food is
comically portrayed, unfortunate frogs that
allow themselves to boil to death are
referred to as “our little green friends,”
that sort of thing. Dobson is at his
creepiest when he thinks he’s being funny.

The point of this foray into science is to
show how malleable living creatures are
by nature, to the rule of pain and
pleasure. This is evidence of God’s design,
of His provision for authority on earth. It
starts in the home, but the child’s “view of
parental authority becomes the cornerstone
of his later outlook on school authority,
police and law, the people with whom he will
eventually live and work, and for society in
general.”

So. A big responsibility for parents. But
once the God-given principles of behaviorism
are grasped, there is practically no limit
to what can be done to shape a child’s
conduct—and attitude. Indeed, “proper
attitudes” are the ultimate point. Dobson’s
goal is not enforced conformity; it is
willing, even eager, compliance. That’s
why, in the chapter called “The Miracle
Tools” in which the theories of Thorndyke
and Skinner are explained and applied,
Dobson advocates a regime of mostly positive
reinforcement—that is, of rewards. He
dismisses the prevalent opinion that
children should not be bribed into doing
what they are supposed to do and, typically,
he makes his case by invoking the whole
social order. “Rewards,” he informs us,
“make responsible effort worthwhile. The
main reason for the overwhelming success of
capitalism is that hard work and personal
discipline are rewarded materially.”

That’s why parents should preside over the
child’s environment in positively
reinforcing ways. They might, for example,
draw up a chart called “My Jobs” which lists
the things they expect their 4 to 6 year old
to do around the house. Dobson provides a
sample chart with 14 sample items like “I
emptied the trash without being told,” but
also things like “I said thank you and
please today” and even “I minded Mommy
today.” So the definition of “jobs” is
capacious. Every behavior imaginable can be
governed in this way. Nothing need be left
to chance, or to the influence of the
outside world.

The behavioral items are arrayed in a column
on the right side of the chart and the days
of the month are strung out in a row along
the top, creating a grid of little squares.
The doctor then explains:

Immediate reinforcement is the key:
each evening, colored dots (preferably red)
or stars should be placed by the behaviors
that were done satisfactorily. If dots are
not available, the squares can be colored
with a felt tip pen; however, the child
should be allowed to chalk up his own
successes...a penny should be granted for
every behavior done properly in a given day;
if more than three items are missed in one
day, no pennies should be given.

So much could be said about this fantastical
proceeding—and others like it, which Dobson
describes in similar detail. The point
system for teenagers (and the thermometer
chart that goes with it) gets into numbers
as high as 10,000. It would take a full
time chore supervisor and maybe an
accountant to maintain it. But, in this
context I want simply to highlight Dobson’s
compulsion to oversee everything.
Once he begins to imagine his system
implemented, he can’t stop. He hovers over
parents like a SuperDad, instructing them
with the same relentless consistency he
expects of them in relation to their
children. It’s that drive for an
all-encompassing structure of doctrine and
practice that characterizes fundamentalist
religion, but channeled here into an
elaborate “scientific” calculus and
procedure weirdly reminiscent of Jeremy
Bentham at his most utopian.

But that doesn’t make it secular, not in Dr.
Dobson’s hands. The business of raising
children who will respect authority and
function appropriately in a capitalist
society turns out to be an intricate
exercise in behavioral engineering, that’s
true, but it’s part of God’s plan. God was
the one who fashioned those pleasure/pain
switches, after all—and Dobson is His deputy
because Dobson is the one who understands
His intelligent design and knows how to make
it work.

Mere selections from the text cannot do
justice to Dobson’s confidence in his own
judgment, based on this knowledge. There’s a
cumulative effect, a rhetorical cadence that
never lets up. Adults inclined to decide
things for themselves must eventually recoil
from this monotonous pounding, but, for
Dobson’s readers, longing for authority, the
effect is vastly reassuring. A fortress is
under construction, a fortress that promises
to protect their families in the short run
and found a kingdom in the long.

What Dobson, credentialed now as The Maker’s
Engineer, is essentially doing is deputizing
parents in their turn. He envisions legions
of them, doing God’s work in their homes,
one by one. He is quite explicit about his
deputizing function. Responding to a
question about the role of fear in the
child’s attitude toward parents, he says:

He can enjoy complete security and
safety—until he chooses to attack me. Then
I’ll give him reason to fear. This concept
of fear is modeled after God’s relationship
with man. “Fear of God is the beginning of
wisdom,” we are taught. He is a God of
awesome wrath as well as a God of infinite
love and mercy. These attributes are
complementary, and should be represented in
lesser degree in our homes.

A fundamentalist schema is complete. An
architecture is provided that fuses the
natural and social orders and subjects every
action to prescription.

This is the proper context for a fair
assessment of Dobson’s oft-quoted remarks
about spanking. Awareness of that context
does nothing to diminish the severity of his
attitude, as evident in his descriptions of
the deed as in his visage and manner. But
it does bring out the consistency of
Dobson’s thought. There is only one
situation in which spanking is called for,
and that’s when a child under ten years of
age directly defies a parent.

When a youngster tries this kind of
stiff-necked rebellion, you had better take
it out of them and pain is a marvelous
purifier. When nose-to-nose confrontation
occurs between you and your child, it is not
the time to have a discussion about the
virtues of obedience...You have drawn a line
in the dirt, and the child has deliberately
flopped his big hairy toe across it. Who is
going to win? Who has the most courage?
Who is in charge here?

Big hairy toe? On a child under ten?

It’s that hair again. Images of violation
crowd into Dobson’s mind whenever he
contemplates defiance of authority. They
can get very explicit, almost pornographic,
reflecting his determination to incite the
outrage such violations should provoke in
any righteous heart. Take, for example, the
case of a tiger toddler who spat in his
mother’s face whenever she put him to bed.
Not daring to discipline, she tried
discussion instead but “her lecture was
interrupted by another moist missile.”
Corrupted by dogmas of permissiveness,
impervious to her own humiliation, this poor
misguided Mom actually “wiped her face and
began again, at which point the youngster
hit her with another well-aimed blast.”

Another student radical in the making.

But the most revealing aspect of the whole
spanking business is actually to be found in
Dobson’s prescription for presiding over the
aftermath. His programmatic commitment to
Pavlovian principles in a God-ordered world
never wavers. After assuring us that “it is
not necessary to beat the child into
submission,” he explains why. It seems that
a spanking of “sufficient magnitude to cause
the child to cry genuinely” will often lead
that child, after a certain “emotional
ventilation,” to “crumple to the breast of
his parent” and, if he does that, “he should
be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms.”

To be fair to Dobson it must be said that he
goes to great lengths to condemn arbitrary,
impulsive punishment. He issues a stream of
caveats. He does not want to be
misunderstood. He is not carrying a brief
for parental abuse. He really believes he
is talking about what he calls “corrective
love.” The strict guidelines for corporeal
punishment (child under 10, in direct
defiance etc.) are all the more urgently
strict because of the threat of disorder
represented by out-of-control parents who
are not qualified to be God’s
deputies in the home. Spanking must be
performed deliberately, with emotional
clarity and restraint.

Hmmm.

Dobson obviously enjoys the power that goes
with authority, and, as we have seen, a bit
of sadism is evident in his depictions of
experiments on animals. We catch of whiff
of it too, in relation to punishing kids,
especially when they are teen-agers. His
anatomically detailed instructions on how to
squeeze a particular muscle in a toddler’s
shoulder to administer a bolt of pain is
inexplicably decked out with a gratuitous
anecdote about how he himself (with his
“rather large hands”) used the technique on
some rowdy adolescents—this story reads like
a soft core Death Wish script. But
Dobson’s top priority is unquestionably
order, whatever secondary gains might accrue
to the punishing authority. In the home, in
the school, in the state—ultimately in all
Creation—order above all.

And so he insists: the one who dares to
discipline must be disciplined.

With one truly bizarre exception.

This is the only moment in the book that is
obviously inconsistent with the rest of it.
Dobson is a smart man; he must have known,
at some level, that this anecdote didn’t
fit. That can only mean he was so attached
to it that he couldn’t bring himself to
leave it out. That happens to writers
sometimes.

My own mother had an unusual understanding
of good disciplinary procedures. She was
very tolerant of my childishness, and I
found her reasonable on most issues...But
there was one matter on which she was
absolutely rigid: she did not tolerate
“sassiness.” She knew that back talk and
“lip” are a child’s most potent weapons of
defiance, and they must be discouraged. I
learned very early that if I was going to
launch a flippant attack on her, I had
better be at least ten or twelve feet away.
This distance was necessary to avoid being
hit with whatever she could get in her
hands. On one occasion she cracked me with
a shoe; at other times she used a handy
belt. The day I learned the importance of
staying out of reach shines like a neon
light in my mind. I made the costly mistake
of “sassing” her when I was about four feet
away, She wheeled around grab something
with which to hit me, and her hand landed on
a girdle. She drew back and swung that
abominable garment in my direction, and I
can still hear it whistling through the
air. The intended blow caught me across the
chest, followed by a multitude of straps and
buckles, wrapping themselves around my
midsection. She gave me an entire thrashing
with one massive blow!

Well, well.

So much could be said about that one
too.

But let us content ourselves with the
realization that Dr. Dobson had his own
reasons for craving order.

Thomas de Zengotitais a
contributing editor at Harper's
Magazine. He teaches at The Dalton School
and the Draper Graduate Program at New York
University. His book Mediated,
received the 2006 Marshall McLuhan Award for
outstanding work in the field from the Media
Ecology Association.